I know my question isn't very specific and uses Android specific terminology (i.e. views) but the idea is there's a many to many relationship between Provider
's and Location
's and we need to display it with the constraint that this is being done in a mobile application (both phones and tablets, watches and tvs are ruled out).
The original designers only thought about this one layer deep and wanted the user selecting something from the Provider
list to be taken to an Provider
detail screen which has information on Provider
as well as a list of related Location
's which are all clickable and will take you to a Location
detail screen.
Guess what's on the Location
detail screen? THAT'S RIGHT! It's Location
information with a list of related Provider
's!. So now the application's navigation will look like this (roughly, assuming the user clicked on Provider2
was presented with Provider2
's detail page then clicked on Location2
):
- Provider1
- Provider2
- Location1
- Location2
- Provider2
- Provider4
- ...
- Location3
- Provider3
You get the idea. Even worse, no one seems to want to commit to what they think the "back" button should do. Does it take you back up the tree (thereby making the app navigation infinite and quite frankly more difficult to code and maintain) or does it take you back to the root or does it serve some other function? Is there a good design pattern for mobile to handle this in a better way? If so, does it address the "infinite navigation" problem?